Let the Nations Be Glad!: The Supremacy of God in Missions

by John Piper

Why do we do missions? We are told, by Jesus, to preach the gospel and make disciples of all nations. So missions is duty, right? Wrong. If you do missions purely from a sense of duty you will not honor those you are reaching out to, nor will you truly honor God. Duty is the wrong place to look, so where do we find the answer to why we do missions? We turn, according to Jo...

DownloadRead Online

Title

:

Let the Nations Be Glad!: The Supremacy of God in Missions

Author

:

John Piper

Rating

:

Edition Language

:

English

Let the Nations Be Glad!: The Supremacy of God in Missions Reviews

clAViD

So uh, basically... I think almost every Christian should try to read this book. I've written about this book on my blog so I'll just copy and paste a section from it:

I'll do an overview/sample of each chapter and begin each overview by stating a type of audience that will specially benefit from that chapter. There will be no doubt that you will fall into at least one of these categories or know of others that do and hopefully that will pique your interest and cause you to go out and read this b

So uh, basically... I think almost every Christian should try to read this book. I've written about this book on my blog so I'll just copy and paste a section from it:

I'll do an overview/sample of each chapter and begin each overview by stating a type of audience that will specially benefit from that chapter. There will be no doubt that you will fall into at least one of these categories or know of others that do and hopefully that will pique your interest and cause you to go out and read this book =)

---

I will skip Chapter 1 and 6 because I've mentioned it in my previous post.

Chapter 2: For those who strugge to pray or who struggle to pray with earnestness, gravity, and desperation. This chapter is another reason I give this book a 5 out of 5. In it, Piper talks about the "Supremacy of God in Missions Through Prayer." The biblical truth of life as war that Piper brings to light in this chapter has changed my life - which includes my "prayer life" if we can separate it like that. I've posted quotes from that chapter and so you guys have had a taste.

Chapter 3: For those who struggle with materialism, complacency, and desire to fulfill the comfortable "American Dream" life. In this chapter Piper about the "Supremacy of God in Missions Through Suffering."

Chapter 4: For those who have ever had the question: "do people who live in an unreached island and never hear about Jesus go to hell?" This chapter gets a little dense as Piper defends the historical view of the eternality of hell (as opposed to annihalationism - a view John Stott holds), the necessity of Christ's atonement for salvation, and the necessity for people to hear of Christ in order to be saved. He defends those three views to defend that the supremacy of Christ means that He is the only way to salvation and along the way you see the implications it has for the Christian church and for the missionary task

*Chapter 5: For those who do not have a GLOBAL passion for God (i.e. for those who don't really care too much about missions). For those who have asked: "Why should we have a passion for frontier missions? Why can't we just have a passion for evangelism in general? Why can't we just save up money to reach out to the the neighborhood I'm in? Why are we saving money for frontier missions? Aren't we just trying to save as many people as possible?" Piper distinguishes missions from evangelism, or Paul-type ministries from Timothy-type ministries! He does a study of the phrase "all nations" from the Great Comission and traces the use of the words in the phrase from the Hebrew and Greek in the OT and NT. This chapter was CRUCIAL in my understanding of missions. He says: "the fact that there is a distinct calling on the church to do frontier missionary work among all the remaining unreached people groups is crystal clear from the New Testament" (195). He closes by discussing how diversity magnifies the glory of God - this was really cool.

Chapter 7: For those who are Christian. Hahaha got you. Piper does a sort of biblical & historical theology of "worship" in order to find the essence of worship, again going into the Greek and Hebrew. Here's one pithy quote of his definition on what worship is and then a short expansion of it: "Worship is seeing, savoring, and showing the glory of all that God is for us in Jesus Christ" - "Worship is right affections in the heart toward God, rooted in right thoughts in the head about God, becoming visible in right actions of the body reflecting God" (207). Again this was one of those life-changing chapters and another reason I give this book a 5/5. Here I post a quote from Piper where he goes against a common Christian saying many of us have heard about church and Sunday services. The saying is: "The problem is that our people don't come on Sunday morning to give; they only come to get. If they came to give, we would have life." And Piper's response: "That is probably not a good diagnosis. People ought to come to get" (227). The application/implication part of this chapter is so relevant.

Paul

Al Mohler says, "'

' is the most important book on missions for this generation, and I hope it will be the most influential as well." My thoughts on this book would echo Dr. Mohler's opinion. This book is certainly vintage Piper. Every chapter is God-centered, Scripture-saturated, and Christ-exalting. Unlike most modern books on missions, it is more theological treatise than missiological strategy. Don't let that scare you away, however. While I have had my struggles muddl

Al Mohler says, "'

' is the most important book on missions for this generation, and I hope it will be the most influential as well." My thoughts on this book would echo Dr. Mohler's opinion. This book is certainly vintage Piper. Every chapter is God-centered, Scripture-saturated, and Christ-exalting. Unlike most modern books on missions, it is more theological treatise than missiological strategy. Don't let that scare you away, however. While I have had my struggles muddling through some of Piper's work, this was a very easy read. The chapters are very logical, and he breaks almost every thought up with section heads. I spilled a great deal of yellow ink highlighting the 259 pages of this book, and I will certainly be keeping it close at hand as a resource for all of my life and ministry.

Glen

This modern classic on missions is more of a theological treaty instead of a methodological one. It is imminently quoted due to its strong theological polemic for missions and the writer formidable skills of articulation.

Focusing on a Theo-centric understanding of the mission mandate, Piper demonstrates how God’s glorious revelation is the starting and ending point in the plan of redemption. In this way, the book serves as a welcomed response to the current missiological trends that de-emphasize

This modern classic on missions is more of a theological treaty instead of a methodological one. It is imminently quoted due to its strong theological polemic for missions and the writer formidable skills of articulation.

Focusing on a Theo-centric understanding of the mission mandate, Piper demonstrates how God’s glorious revelation is the starting and ending point in the plan of redemption. In this way, the book serves as a welcomed response to the current missiological trends that de-emphasize proclamation and often elevate humanitarian needs as the paramount concern. This book offers a balance perspective that fully endorses compassionate work under the larger spectrum of helping people groups to hear the Good News of God’s invitation to eternal life.

The chapters on God’s supremacy and Christ as the Supreme manifestation of God’s glory on earth are filled with strong exegetical content. There are times when the reader will have to follow some technical analsis of Greek and Hebrew words but you are rewarded by eloquent summarizations of how these impact the global work.

Jonathan Edwards and other Puritan luminaries take their customary elevated status in Piper’s thinking. Yet, this is not a larger theological treatment of Calvinistic views on election and predestination. Furthermore, there is a more limited focus on key subjects that articulate the scope of missions and how it differs from evangelism. This gives the book a wider audience without compromising the writer’s strong convictions.

Aside from these observations on the book’s contents, there is the sheer joy of ready the work of a capable author who combines acumen with artistic skill to produce a passionate polemic for the church to fulfill her mission mandate. For this I am deeply grateful.

Philip Mcduffie

"Moreover, there is something about God that is so universally praiseworthy and so profoundly beautiful and so comprehensively worthy and so deeply satisfying that God will find passionate admirers in every diverse people group in the world. His true greatness will be manifest in the breadth of the diversity of those who perceive and cherish His beauty. The more diverse the people groups who forsake their gods to follow the true God, the more visible God's superiority over all His competitors."

"Moreover, there is something about God that is so universally praiseworthy and so profoundly beautiful and so comprehensively worthy and so deeply satisfying that God will find passionate admirers in every diverse people group in the world. His true greatness will be manifest in the breadth of the diversity of those who perceive and cherish His beauty. The more diverse the people groups who forsake their gods to follow the true God, the more visible God's superiority over all His competitors." Piper

Michael Bering Smith

John Piper’s volume Let The Nations Be Glad presents a cogent, clear, and commendable case for making world missions a celebrated means, rather than a mere necessary end. Missions books often promote a view that the end goal of missions is to make missionaries, train them, and get them “into the field.” As long as we have gotten them there, we have achieved our goal. Piper does not move so fast. Missions, he says, is not the end. It is the means. “Missions is not the ultimate goal of the church.

John Piper’s volume Let The Nations Be Glad presents a cogent, clear, and commendable case for making world missions a celebrated means, rather than a mere necessary end. Missions books often promote a view that the end goal of missions is to make missionaries, train them, and get them “into the field.” As long as we have gotten them there, we have achieved our goal. Piper does not move so fast. Missions, he says, is not the end. It is the means. “Missions is not the ultimate goal of the church. Worship is. Missions exists because worship doesn’t.” What is the glorious goal of missions? It is nothing less than the collective peoples of the earth, together treasuring the glory of God in the face of Christ. That is the end for which the means of mission was purposed, and worship, prayer, and suffering—the book’s three-pronged first part—are integral in getting us there.

THE CONTENTS

Space allows only a brief survey of the books contents, so we will glimpse them in short. In the first chapter, Piper introduces the supremacy of God in missions through worship. Here Piper establishes his foundation, that worship is ultimate because God is ultimate, and the grateful acknowledgement of his supremacy (worship) is what we are seeking when we involve ourselves in missions. Chapter two issues a call to prayer. We the church have received our marching orders. “Go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret.” (Matthew 6:6) We are to “pray without ceasing.” (1 Thessalonians 5:17) For missions to succeed, we must plead prayerfully, putting the fruitful outcome of missions under the sovereign mercy of God. In chapter three, Piper richly portrays how the inevitable life of suffering brought by the pursuit of missions is a life most worthy of living. “Whoever loses his life for my sake and the gospel’s will save it” (Mark 8:35) Jim Elliot, a missionary martyr among the Auca natives of Ecuador would agree. “He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose.” Chapter four preaches Christ as the only means to salvation from the horrors of hell, as the object of conscious, saving faith. Piper here does nothing less than radically draw our eyes to the depths and trepidations of the biblical doctrine of hell and the heights and rising peaks of God’s love for us in Christ as the only Savior from it. This is perhaps one of the greatest contributions of this book. Piper closes in the final chapters by in chapter five defining missions not according to love, but by God. It is God and his acknowledged glory which must be the foundation for our understanding of missions, not love for the souls of nations. Chapter six and seven end the volume with a survey of the life of Jonathan Edwards and an elaboration on Piper’s purpose for writing the book.

THE AUDIENCE

For whom is the book written? Let The Nations Be Glad is written with the Christian lay-believer and the Christian pastor in mind. With some careful attention, a non-believer will likely be able to follow along. Yet I do not see it likely they will be interested in what is here. The volume is no-holds-bar, black-coffee Christianity—the real stuff. Piper does not cut corners. He opens the Bible with lucidity and without apology. Yet in doing so, he is sure to assume nothing of his reader. That is a good thing. He is plain in speech, thorough in explanations, and (sometimes tediously) clear in his arguments; so clear that sometimes (a rarity) the broader scope is clouded in the slow belaboring of excessive detail. I experienced this in chapter 5 where Piper sets forth an extended argumentation on what he sees as the correct way to interpret panta ta ethne (“all nations” in Matthew 28:20). Piper may be justified in his laborious defense, for how we interpret “all nations” will determine in large part our view of the extent of the great commission, one of Christ’s final commands and a battle cry for Christian missions. (Is Christ telling us to go to all nations, all ethnic groups, all individual unsaved Gentiles, or something else entirely?) Yet the point could have been received with more immediateness were there a more succinct presentation. Overall, Piper approaches and touches on many strong, complex theological arguments, while keeping his prose at a simple level of reading. He brings the reader along with him.

MEDITATION: A LOVE OF THINGS

Every now and again as one reads a book, uncovering some distant theological landscape or familiarizing oneself with a new spiritual topic, a sentence will suddenly leap from the page, gripping the reader and making so forceful an impression as to change them in their seat. The mind stops. The book falls into the lap. A deeper reflection is prompted. This did not happen for me in my reading of Let The Nations Be Glad. Yet there were two times that came close.

One statement I found worthy of meditation was in the third chapter. Piper wrote: “It will be difficult to bring the nations to love God from a lifestyle that communicates a love of things.” It is a statement innocuous enough, yet it deeply struck me, first because of the overwhelming consensus today that material things are of all things most dear. Things hold an inordinate sway on us all. We are blind men; materialists, consumed by the physical and averse to the spiritual. Yet this is not how it ought to be, and we believers who share Piper’s passion for the supremacy of God must feel this incongruency more deeply. How unseeing are we of our stinginess? Are we giving sacrificially to the labor of the gospel in our local church? Are we demonstrating love for things of God by taking responsibility for our church, pursuing membership, and involving ourselves financially in its well-being and continued sustenance? Supporting its missionaries? Its pastors? We are told: “Go into all the world and proclaim the gospel to the whole creation.” (Mark 16:15) We may well do this, leaving our homes to evangelize the greater world. Yet what of it, if we come with the wealth of Westerners? It would be delusional to think we can preach a gospel of grace with our mouths and not preach the prosperity gospel with our lives. We can, and we do.

Piper’s statement jarred me into wondering how readily my own lifestyle communicates the love of things, and what damage that could do to my commendation of Christ. In his sermon “The Weight of Glory” delivered at St. Mary The Virgin Church at Oxford in 1942, C.S. Lewis commented on the worldliness of Christians. “We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.” Does this not describe the people with whom we pray, sing hymns, hear sermons, enjoy fellowship? Too easily pleased by earthly delights? Taken by the allure of the latest iPhone? In our culture, materialism reigns. Have we unwittingly imbibed the toxin? This I believe is a point that requires more emphasis in the local church—radical generosity, counter-cultural living, in our finances, our things, our time. The theme of Lewis’ sermon was not self-indulgence but self-denial. We must see that it is only in the giving up of ourselves that the infinite joy will be found.

MEDITATION: A VIEW FOR ETERNITY

A second phrase that seized me was: “I know of no one who has overstated the terrors of hell.” The reality of hell and eternity is a dogma taught infrequently in our churches today. We (especially in the secular west, but increasingly in the global scene) live in “the now,” a me-focused, present-oriented mode of being where the latest is greatest, forward progress dominates our thoughts and industries, and anything remotely old is deemed eternally out of date; the future is worth thinking about, only as much as it pertains to our days here, now, on this earth. Heaven is no longer on our minds. That is old fashioned. Many of us, Christians included, pass our days unaware that our moment on earth is a mortal one, that our first breath is one of our last, and that we, like a seed, will one day be planted. Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor identifies this as the “immanent frame,” that is, the unconsciously inhabited view of the universe as a place entirely absent of the supernatural; all there is to reckon with is the “immanent” or immediate context, that which is before us, the natural world disenchanted of the numinous, metaphysical, or eternal.

With the rest of the secular West, evangelical Christians have drawn this air largely unawares. As a result, we think on the here and now (finances, marriage, parenting—all important realms no doubt) and neglect the deep soul work of preparing for eternity. It is a long labor and a haunting on, facing death. It intimidates. Yet we must face it. We must turn, and allow ourselves to approach the endless hall of eternity. We need to open back up our perspective, and work ourselves to accommodate the eternal into our very temporally bound state of living. Where will we be spending our days, the real length of them? In the place where moth and rust do not destroy, where thieves do not break in and steal (Matthew 6:19). It is of vital import. May we, as Piper encourages us to do in Let The Nations Be Glad (chapter 5, but the beam shines across the whole thing), store up our treasure not here, in the immanent and the temporary, but there, in the transcendent and the eternal, as have many great missionaries who precede us. They counted the cost. They numbered their days (Psalm 90:12). They knew they were but breath, their days a passing shadow (Psalm 144:4). And their kingdom work was better for it.

CONCLUSION

In close, there is much to be gained by the believer in studying these pages. John Piper is a pastor, and a good one. He wants to point his readers to Christ. This book does that with remarkable immediacy and effectiveness; I found my affections for Christ and my gratitude for his work being consistently stirred and my limited view for international missions being opened to the biblical view. That does not happen every time one reads a book. Therefore I would recommend it heartily. I have not cited too much in this review. Yet on such an ending note, perhaps one ought to close with an appropriate citation from the work itself. In some ways, the following quote on the love of God summarizes exactly the entire message of the book’s 288 pages. Read it slowly. “The love of God for perishing sinners moved him to provide at great cost a way to rescue them from everlasting destruction, and missions is the extension of that love to the unreached peoples of the world.”

Highly recommend. Even though Piper gets repetitive sometimes, he presents a lot of good ideas throughout the book, and I respect that he addresses other points of view as well.

Samuel Bierig

So! Good! So....good!

Ryan Wolfe

Probably shouldn't give it just four stars... I don't know. I'm extremely familiar with this book because I had to teach through it. I think my reasoning for not giving it 5 stars is that it seemed to lack unity at certain parts. Some of his key themes and proposals just needed to be stated more times throughout the book.

It seemed, from a redaction perspective, as if he was just piecing together various texts he's already written on Christian hedonism, exclusivism vs inclusivism, universalism, a

Probably shouldn't give it just four stars... I don't know. I'm extremely familiar with this book because I had to teach through it. I think my reasoning for not giving it 5 stars is that it seemed to lack unity at certain parts. Some of his key themes and proposals just needed to be stated more times throughout the book.

It seemed, from a redaction perspective, as if he was just piecing together various texts he's already written on Christian hedonism, exclusivism vs inclusivism, universalism, and some new material he had developed on the "people group" motif.

I would have appreciated more overlap in themes, more integration.

That said - the section on people groups, in its historical context, is very valuable to read. His "two sinking ships" example is almost famous in missiological circles. He was writing close enough to the Ralph Winter's presentation at the Lausanne Conference that most of his support for it is raw and beautifully naive. It's excellent, persuasive reading.

His section on inclusivism and exclusivism is, to me, the best new contribution (from a history-of-Piper's theology standpoint). He's so good at arguing the case for inclusivism that he dedicated an entire book to it (isbn:0801072638) in which he uses most of the material in these chapters.

And, of course, his section on why "missions exists because worship doesn't" is why you bought the book (if you did). It's Christian hedonism at its best. They provide most of this section in the "Perspectives" coursebook because it is so good.

Kelsey brougher

Loved the chapters on suffering and prayer/ spiritual warfare. Really great perspective on missions!

Jeremy

Spent the last year reading this book aloud to my 11 (now 12) year-old son, Elijah, as he prepared to go (and has now returned) to/from Africa. Saturated in Scripture and the glory of God. A must read for any disciple serious about the furtherance of the worship of God in their community, to the ends of the earth.

Readers Also Enjoyed

Welcome Guest

Please create a free account to access unlimited downloads & reading.

Read Books, Magazines & Comics & many more directly on your browser or download on PC or Tablet!

Download at full speed with unlimited bandwidth with just one click!

New Books, Magazines & Comics added every day!

Fully optimized for all platforms - no additional software required !

Get Access to more than 10 million Books, Magazines & Comics for FREE!

Experience all the content you could possibly want from comprehensive library of timeless classics and new releases.

Create Free Account & start reading

We value your privacy. We will not sell or rent your email address to third parties. See our Terms & Conditions and Privacy Policy for more details.

WISE BOOK is in no way intended to support illegal activity. Use it at your risk. We uses Search API to find books/manuals but doesn´t host any files. All document files are the property of their respective owners. Please respect the publisher and the author for their copyrighted creations. If you find documents that should not be here please report them

Let the Nations Be Glad!: The Supremacy of God in Missions by John Piper

Why do we do missions? We are told, by Jesus, to preach the gospel and make disciples of all nations. So missions is duty, right? Wrong. If you do missions purely from a sense of duty you will not honor those you are reaching out to, nor will you truly honor God. Duty is the wrong place to look, so where do we find the answer to why we do missions? We turn, according to Jo......